I have been asked to expand the
brief comments I made on how I see Fr Bernard Lonergan SJ as fundamentally a ‘traditional’
theologian and on the matter of the reaction of some Lonergan scholars to Humanae vitae.

Lonergan (1904-84) took as his motto Pope Leo XIII’s phrase describing how the Church saw
the ‘return’ to the resources of the scholastic tradition, ‘vetera novis augere et perficere’
– ‘to draw new things from the old in order to perfect the old.’ His aim was to appropriate
the great tradition of Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas in order to present this anew as illuminating
the questions and problems of modern philosophy and theology. In doing so Lonergan also drew on thinkers such as
Bl. John Henry Newman as he outlined an account of human thought and cognition which, he argued, one could verify
in one’s own conscious experience. In doing so one could argue for fundamental philosophical positions in epistemology,
metaphysics, natural theology and so on which are those of St Thomas, while also following the advice of the Popes
(i.e. Leo XIII and St Pius X) in sifting out as no longer useful, elements in that tradition which were more bound
up with Aristotelian physics rather than being essential to philosophy. Such self-appropriation, of one’s cognitive,
ethical and affective consciousness can lead to the affirmation of, among other things, one’s objective knowledge
of being and of metaphysics. We should understand, in a way Husserl does not seem to, that to know our own conscious
activities is to know a part of being, part of reality; it is to use our intelligence and reason to know a part
of reality –something about ourselves as conscious beings – just as we use our intelligence and reason to make
judgments about the bus we took on the way to work.

There is no other Catholic theologian of the 20th century who has gone into such detail on the philosophical underpinnings of theology as has Lonergan.
I can say something about my own experience here perhaps. I began my study of philosophy and theology in the late
70s in London and then Rome as a seminarian. I did not complete the course. When I came back to the UK I did a
BA in another area, but then returned to philosophy to do a 2 year MA in Continental Philosophy at one of the very
few UK universities at the time which specialized in continental thought. In fact my own preferences were for looking
at the area of dialogue and debate between Lonergan’s thought and Analytical or Anglo-American philosophy, which
is the area I publish in mostly today. But heeding Lonergan’s call to try ‘to be at the level of one’s times’,
I wanted to understand further what the continental tradition had to offer. So for two years I immersed myself
in the study of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida et al. Then I went on to spend 6 years in Canada
and the US. I did my Ph.D. in a Canadian university that is strongly analytical in orientation; I taught at another
such university for a year and then went on to Boston College for a Post-Doctoral year. It was only when I went
to Boston that I left the secular and often anti-religious environments I had been in for some years.

Because of Lonergan’s approach to the tradition and my understanding of it, I found myself able
to debate and discuss in those different and indeed opposed philosophical environments, while speaking a language
they might understand. All the while this also served to increase my appreciation of the deficiencies of the two
traditions and see the crying need they have for a philosophical approach that brings in the rich resources of
the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, but in a way that speaks to their concerns and starting points. Really one
is also talking about apologetics here: because one is talking about arguing for, giving reasons for the whole
Christian worldview on God, creation and the human person in what are potentially hostile or indifferent contexts.

In my current work I often find that in some section of Lonergan’s magnum opus Insight, that I have not appreciated in detail before, there are resources for
throwing light on some specialized issue in current analytical philosophy. I really cannot think of any other recent
Catholic theologian whose work could serve in that way. But this philosophy was put at the service of theology
by Lonergan. Not only did he labour to produce a work on method in theology, but in his lecturing in Canada in
the 1940s and then his teaching at the Gregorian in Rome in the 50s and early 60s he attempted to apply this philosophical
work, which would enable modern minds to make the vision of St Thomas their own, to areas such as sacramental theology,
Christology and the theology of the Trinity. If I may, I will quote something I wrote in my book Insight and Analysis here:

Teaching at the Gregorian University in the 1950s
and early 60s he [Lonergan] had become used to the problematic antagonism that he had noted in the minds of a good
number of students between the ‘kerygmatic and pastoral’ as opposed to the ‘dogmatic and abstract’. While he admired
greatly the subtlety and profundity of the Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, he could not but
be concerned by the way in which some of his students saw in Marcel a champion of ‘existential authenticity versus
objective truths’.

The problems for the life of the Church, in teaching,
catechesis and liturgy which emerged from this polarisation have been only too evident in the years following the
Second Vatican Council. The pontificate of John Paul II witnessed an attempt to reintegrate these fundamental anthropological
aspects which in modernity and postmodernity are played off one against another. The philosopher-pope sought to
outline an integrated vision analogous to that proposed by Lonergan.

My belief is then, that Lonergan, also found new resources for these areas of theology in St
Thomas and developed further lines of thinking found in the writings of the Saint, when other major Catholic theologians
thought that one had to look elsewhere. I will mention here one or two theologians, whose work I admire, who draw
out further this feature of Lonergan’s work in their own writing.

Fr Giovanni Sala, SJ who died in 2011, was a very faithful servant of the Church. An Italian
Jesuit he had however spent over forty years in Germany, lecturing and writing. Fr Sala met with many challenges
a few years ago when he outspokenly defended the Vatican’s position on the way Catholic abortion counselling services
in Germany could not refer women on for abortion. He was also a renowned scholar in the area of Kant studies and
German idealism, as well as a Lonergan scholar. Lonergan criticises Kant for holding the self-destructive
position that ‘we cannot know that we cannot know’, but that is only the tip of the iceberg of problems in Kant
and German idealists. He valued the work of Giovanni Sala greatly (and referred to him in his late Third Collection) as a scholar respected in Kant circles, who could really show
in detail how this critique applied to Kant and thus show the problems which resulted in German Idealism – a tradition
which also began to have a damaging effect on Catholic theology. In the 1970s and 80s Fr Sala produced a string
of academic articles in which, using Lonergan’s thought, he defended traditional Catholic positions in such areas
as Christology, the Church and the doctrine of transubstantiation against theologians such as Küng and Schillebeeckx.
These essays have been collected (in German) by Prof. Ulrich Lerhner into a volume with a preface by Cardinal Meissner.
In the 1970s Lonergan was also arguing in support of the CDF against the confusions of the Dutch theologians in
Christology (see the essay in his Third Collection).

When (then) Fr Philip Egan and I attended a conference in Mainz 2007 I had the pleasure of meeting
Fr Sala. We had a chat in which we agreed we wanted to be Lonergan scholars in the service of the Church and her
magisterium. He kindly wrote a review of my metaphysics book (Method in Metaphysics, University of Toronto Press, 2008), in PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH, 117, Part 2 (2010), and we were in correspondence until his death.

I also had the pleasure of meeting, at a CIEL conference in 2000, the wonderful French Jesuit
theologian Fr Bertrand de Magerie SJ, a great defender of Catholic orthodoxy and an advocate of what we now call
the Extraordinary Form of Mass. As students of Catholic theology will know, one of Fr de Magerie’s outstanding
contributions was his work on the Holy Trinity, two volumes from which appeared in English translation: The Christian Trinity in History (1982). In the final sections of this work
de Magerie argues that Lonergan’s brilliant and subtle development of the psychological analogy for thinking about
the dogma is the most satisfying and authentic development of St Thomas’ thought; it also accords better with the
magisterium’s teaching than do other contemporary theories on offer. (Lonergan’s work also draws out the social
and intersubjective aspects of this line of thinking for Trinitarian theology).

Like my good friend, the late Lonergan scholar Msgr Terry Tekippe, Fr de Magerie also makes use
of Lonergan’s work in Christology in another book, to defend the magisterium’s teaching on Our Lord’s divine knowledge
and possession of the beatific vision in this life. It gives one much satisfaction to see this doctrine, denied
or downplayed my many, including Rahner, reaffirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and most recently in the CDF censure of the Christology of Sobrino in 2006.

Another Lonergan influenced theologian who has defended this teaching and whose other work I
admire is the American Benedictine Fr Guy Mansini, OSB. Fr Mansini, a regular contributor to journals such as Nova et Vetera, was the first theologian to alert me (through what he wrote
about 20 years ago) to the massive differences between Lonergan and Rahner. Since then I have published essays
on these differences and a critique of Rahner’s philosophy. Mention of Rahner brings to mind the great mistake
that one still often sees repeated that ‘Lonergan is one of the transcendental Thomists’. This was an idea that
Lonergan repudiated himself – for instance in an interview in 1982. A good number of Lonergan scholars have written
to correct this idea; Lonergan preferred to talk of his work as a ‘generalized empirical method’ (I have an article
with that title in the current number of Lonergan Studies (Seton
Hall University NJ).

Fr Mansini has not only argued in articles that Rahner falls short of what we can find better
expressed in Aquinas, but that Balthasar does so too. While there are many great and valuable lessons to be learnt
from von Balthasar, I too share the concerns of Fr Mansini and other philosophical theologians that his work is
philosophically problematic (see the collection of Fr Mansini’s articles in his book, The
Word has Dwelt Among Us, Ave Maria University Press, 2008).

A further point relevant to this discussion is that Lonergan never signed up to the de Lubac
programme on the natural desire to see God. While he criticised many confused scholastic proposed resolutions of
this dilemma, Lonergan also thought that de Lubac had missed the point of Pope Pius XII’s Humani
generis on the issue. In a powerfully argued article on this debate in The Thomist, Fr Mansini has shown how this debate has had profound repercussions
on the life of the Church; and since the stimulating writing of Feingold and others we can see that the question
has not gone away. At worst the de Lubac approach, in exaggerated forms, can lead to a new pelagianism (de Lubac
of course did not want this, but Mansini argues that even de Lubac’s attempts to square his position with that
of Pius XII leave one dissatisfied). However, on this topic I would say that a paper by Brian Himes is even better
than Fr Mansini’s work in bringing out just how Lonergan’s analysis of finality as both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’
can help in approaching the thorny issue of the natural desire and, at once, the gratuity of salvation through
Christ: see, http://www.lonerganresource.com/pdf/contributors/Himes%20-%20Lonergan's%20
Position%20on%20the%20Natural%20Desire%20to%20See%20God.pdf

In later years, Lonergan returned to a lifelong project he had underway to try to come up with
a technically rigorous theory of economics which would really put the Church’s social teaching into operation in
the market place of modern societies. A good number of writers with far more expertise in economics than I could
ever achieve have now taken his work seriously. However, whatever one thinks of this work, in the final analysis,
here again was a unique phenomenon: a late twentieth-century major Catholic theologian also producing a mathematically
fine-tuned economic theory. It is no wonder then that Lonergan felt entitled to make some rather caustic remarks
about the new ‘liberation theology’ as being so much rhetoric or that other Jesuits who were turning in the 70s
to Marxism would only find a theory that was flawed not only philosophically but in terms of economic theory too.

Before I return briefly to the Humanae vitae
topic, I should mention other Lonergan scholars who have used his thought in defence of the magisterium of the
Church. Here I would draw attention Sr Prudence Allen and Dr. Deborah Savage, both Lonergan scholars, who argue
in defence of the Church’s infallible teaching that women cannot be ordained priests.

In previous comments on Humanae vitae I agreed
with Fr Purcell’s point that Lonergan’s reservations about an Aristotelian ‘biological’ position on contraception
as problematic, were made in a private letter; a letter later made public by the executors having oversight of
his legacy; I am sure they were quite entitled to do this. But perhaps one might also encourage publication of
another long and quite famous letter by Lonergan in which he is highly critical of the directions the Jesuit order
is beginning to take after Vatican II.

In my previous comments I drew attention to a section of my book Insight
and Analysis in which I discuss this letter (on contraception) and the argument in it.
I argue that if one makes such an objection to the proposed
immorality of contraception in the way that the letter seems to do, then it does not constitute a cogent argument against the Church’s position. However, I also add towards the
end of my comments that Lonergan’s work as a whole can point us in a more positive direction. In fact this is the
way Fr Matthew Lamb comes at the issue.

Professor Lamb was a long time collaborator with Lonergan. He taught for many years at Boston
College, where I first met in him 1992-3. Since then he has moved on to Ave Maria University; the move, I think,
speaks for itself. Fr Lamb is certainly a theologian of renown in the US; with numerous publications to his name,
Fr Lamb became increasingly concerned through the 1980s and 1990s that a proper formation in Catholic theology
was dying out, and being replaced by a ‘religious studies’ eclectic amalgam. Without that knowledge, Lamb has argued,
one cannot really understand where Lonergan is coming from, since that is the great tradition upon which he draws.

In his contribution to a collection of essays in honour of Fr Romanus Cessario O.P. (Ressourcement Thomism, Catholic University of America Press, 2010) Fr Lamb draws
attention to the work of another Lonergan scholar, Dr. David Fleischacker, and to his yet unpublished paper ‘Lonergan
and the Surd and Sin of Contraception’. Lamb and Fleischacker argue that Lonergan’s work on statistically emergent
probability in natural processes can, when applied to the human sexual diversity of man and woman, in fact deepen
our appreciation of the truth of the Church’s teaching against contraception. While the article is not yet out
one can get a sense of Fleischacker’s work (I believe his wife is a biologist) from the online articles he has
posted on this on the Washington DC Lonergan website of which he is one of the moderators: see, http://lonergan.org/?p=787

Of course it would have been better for Lonergan himself to have come out in defence of Pope
Paul VI at the time of the encyclical. I am sorry that he didn’t. One can remember the rather confused days of
the 1970s in the Church, a period which thanks to the Holy Spirit I believe we have moved beyond. In that period
even folk like the (then) Fr Joseph Ratzinger aired in publications certain views on possible changes in the Church
which they subsequently revised and retracted.

In conclusion I would like to return to some further lines I have at the end of my book mentioned
before:

I hope and believe that this is not testimony to
any slavish discipleship on my part with regard to the twentieth-century Canadian Jesuit. That would be contrary
to the intention of Lonergan’s work. Rather, my own attempts to appropriate not only the core positions in Lonergan’s
philosophy, but also to work through some of the implications of Lonergan’s other insights, only serve to convince
me of their immense value in the world of philosophy and theology. I would, therefore, endorse what Lonergan himself
said in an interview at the 1970 International Florida conference on his thought:

The word Lonerganian has come up in recent days. In a sense there’s no such thing. Because I’m asking people
to discover themselves and be themselves. They can arrive at conclusions different from mine on the basis of what
they find in themselves. And in that sense it is a way.[1]

Andrew Beards is Academic Director at the
School of the Annunciation, a Higher Institute of Catholic Education based at Buckfast Abbey, Devon UK. He is author
of Lonergan, Meaning and
Method, (Bloomsbury,
2016), Insight and Analysis, (Continuum, 2010), Philosophy the Quest for Truth and Meaning, (Liturgical Press, 2010), Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy, (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Objectivity and Historical Understanding (Ashgate, 1997).